I Loved My Hired Golf Clubs So Much I Nearly Bought A Set

Over the years I have travelled both abroad and domestically fairly extensively in the line of work. And yes, I am classing playing golf courses to then write about them as an entirely legitimate occupation!

In the past, you tended to take your own clubs everywhere with you, lugging a heavy, unwieldy flight bag around airports and out to hire car lots at great cost to your back and shoulders.

And although I have recently been fortunate enough to acquire a Sun Mountain ClubGlider Meridian flight cover – a truly ingenious invention that has transformed the process from burden to complete breeze – for various reasons, I do sometimes have to put myself at the mercy of the resort hire set.

This can be a game of real roulette, with some hire clubs battered into oblivion, others fairly decent and others still fresh out of the box to start the new season if you happen to time it right.

On a recent trip to Penha Longa, home to one of the best courses in Portugal, I drew a fairly reasonable hire set straw. Yes some of the clubs showed a little more wear than you might ideally like in your own set – the result of fairly casual headcover use over the years, I imagine – but they were all Titleists and just a generation older than the current range.

After buggying down to the 1^st tee on the Monastery course, I pondered what club for the shot in hand – a par 3 of 155 yards, slightly downhill but with perhaps a three-club wind into and off the left. I looked down at my bag and selected the Titleist T200 6-iron. With no warm-up and a few days since I’d last played, I wasn’t expecting much in testing conditions.

I flushed it on to the green, two-putted for par, smiled to myself and drove on to the 2^nd hole. Over the course of the next two days and 27 holes, that pattern was largely repeated, with flushed strikes far exceeding even minor mishits.

I liked the blade length, loved the thickness of the topline and felt really confident looking down on this iron at address. On the second morning, I went to the trouble of jotting down the shaft spec of both the T200 iron – True Temper AMT Red regular steel - and the TSR1 driver that I was also enjoying hitting, though probably no better than my own Ping G425 LST driver.

Now, I’m not unhappy with my current Honma TW747Vx irons but something about the way I struck the T200s got me searching ebay and other secondhand golf club sites the day I got home, determined to hunt down a set and make an impulse purchase.

I’ll be absolutely honest – I had no idea how well or otherwise irons retained their value these days and had in my mind that if I could find a set for £400 or less I’d just hit that ‘buy’ button and eagerly await their arrival.

Sadly, my calculations were miles out and I was living in dreamland. I was genuinely surprised by the price of some second-hand irons, including the one that had so caught my eye. Half an hour later I’d failed to find any T200 2023 irons for much less than £700, with some a fair bit more depending on condition, how many clubs etc.

I really had thought I would be buying a set that would hopefully perform as well back on home soil as they had in the Portuguese sunshine, but with the price getting on for twice what I had in mind, I had to rapidly reconsider.

But it was the first time I had ever liked a hire club so much that I’d seriously looked into tracking down a set to buy. So, if you know anyone who wants to shift a set of Titleist T200 2023 irons in that spec for £400 or less...